Exhibition “Connection”

Apartment exhibition

August 6 - August 13, 2023
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The project Connection emerged in late 2022 as a response to wartime separation, when intimate bonds were disrupted and redefined by distance. Conceived in dialogue with my twin sister, Ksenia, who remained in Odesa while I was based in Berlin, the work was first presented on August 6, 2022 - coinciding with Twins Day - in my temporary apartment in Berlin. This initial act of showing underscored the work’s central concerns: the entanglement of biography, memory, and the politics of displacement.

The project explores the specificity of twinship as both a personal condition and a conceptual framework. By translating my relationship with my sister into painting, while Ksenia, a pianist, composed a musical counterpart, Connection interrogates how intimacy, trust, and shared identity can be mediated through artistic form.

The inclusion of projected phrases - fragments of language once used to compare us as children - extends the work beyond the autobiographical, implicating viewers in processes of recognition, categorization, and relationality.

Visually, the paintings stage intertwined corporeal forms as a metaphor for affinity and dependence, but also for the tension of individuality within sameness. A recurring grid overlays the canvases and the exhibition space itself, functioning simultaneously as a structure of containment and a screen of protection. Derived from the digital interface of Procreate, the grid signals the increasingly hybrid condition of painting - situated between material tradition and technological mediation. Within the canvases, white digital guidelines are deliberately preserved and integrated, transforming what is usually hidden in the process of image-production into a visible structural principle.

In this way, Connection positions painting not as a closed medium, but as a site of negotiation between intimacy and distance, memory and technology.

Sound composition by Ksenia Kostina

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